The Nordic eInfrastructure Collaboration (NeIC) organises a major conference in one of the Nordic countries every other year. This year’s conference, NeIC 2019 - Nordic Infrastructure for Open Science, will be hosted in Denmark by the Danish e-Infrastructure Cooperation (DeIC) together with the NeIC.
Examples of various current Open Science collaborations in the Nordic region will be presented at the three-day conference. Nordic measures will also be discussed in an international perspective in order to place Open Science cooperation in a broader context, particularly in connection with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), explains Kine Bugge Halvorsen, Senior Adviser with the NeIC.
“Open Science is really in the wind right now – at the Nordic, European and international levels,” Ms Halvorsen states. “Open Science has long been part of the NeIC’s focus and we want to bring our Nordic partners even more up to speed in the field. We’ve invited speakers to demonstrate Open Science in practice – in real life scenarios. We will also discuss a variety of issues related to Open Science, for example personal privacy versus openness. A number of international lecturers will also be present to talk about Open Science, not just in a Nordic context, but in European and global contexts as well. We have much to learn from one another and from international collaboration – not just between Nordic countries, but with other regions of Europe and the US as well.”
“This conference is important because the five Nordic countries share many similarities in terms of how we are approaching Open Science and we have an excellent basis for working closely together. Nordic collaboration offers other benefits as well,” Ms Halvorsen explains. “For example, it enables us to work more efficiently and reduces costs. Most important, however, is that bringing people together makes it possible to translate the focus on Open Science into something of real value that generates concrete research activity,” she concludes.
The conference programme includes keynote speakers, parallel sessions and workshops, with the following speakers confirmed:
- Gudmund Høst, Director of NeIC, will open the conference and present what Nordic collaboration on research infrastructure involves in the context of Open Science.
- Christine Kirkpatrick, Division Director of Research Data Services at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), University of California San Diego and Executive Director of the US National Data Service, will share her insights on how Open Science is being put into practice in the US.
- Hilary Hanahoe, Secretary General of Research Data Alliance (RDA), will examine the question of whether the RDA is actually a help or a hindrance to Open Science.
- A number of Nordic Open Science speakers will demonstrate specific infrastructure solutions of critical importance for research and data sharing.
- Dr. Anders Løland, Assistant Research Director of Statistical Analysis, Machine Learning and Image Analysis at the Norwegian Computing Center, will speak on artificial intelligence, focusing on transparency, privacy and legal aspects.
The conference will be held 14–16 May 2019 at the Tivoli Hotel & Congress Center in Copenhagen. The conference is a collaboration between the NeIC, the DeIC, the IT Center for Science (CSC), the Icelandic University Research Network (RHnet), the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) and Uninett Sigma2.
